I.4. [Estranged Labour]

[XXII] We have started from the presuppositions of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labour, capital and land, and likewise of wages, profit of capital and ground-rent; the division of labour; competition; the concept of exchange-value, etc. Out of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and of the most wretched commodity; that the misery of the worker stands in inverse proportion to the power and size of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and so the more terrible restoration of monopoly; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and landlord, like that between the tiller of the soil and the manufacturing worker, disappears, and the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes of the owners and the propertyless workers.

Political economy starts from the fact of private property. It does not explain it to us. It grasps the material process that private property goes through in reality in general, abstract formulas, which then count for it as laws. It does not comprehend these laws, that is, it does not show how they arise from the nature of private property. Political economy gives us no explanation of the ground of the division between labour and capital, between capital and land. When, for example, it determines the relation of wages to the profit of capital, the interest of the capitalists counts for it as the ultimate ground; that is, it presupposes what it ought to develop. In the same way competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. How far these external, apparently accidental circumstances are only the expression of a necessary development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels that the political economist sets in motion are greed and the war among the greedy, competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the connections within the movement, the doctrine of competition could be set against the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of freedom of trades against the doctrine of the corporations, the doctrine of the division of landed property against the doctrine of the great estate; for competition, freedom of trades and the division of landed property were developed and conceived only as accidental, deliberate, violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation and feudal property, not as necessary, inevitable, natural ones.

We now have to grasp the essential connection between private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property, of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of men, of monopoly and competition, etc., between this whole estrangement and the money system.

Let us not, like the political economist when he wants to explain something, put ourselves in an imaginary primordial condition. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. It merely pushes the question back into a grey, misty distance. It presupposes in the form of a fact, of an event, what it ought to deduce, namely the necessary relation between two things, for example between the division of labour and exchange. In the same way theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of man; that is, it presupposes as a fact, in the form of history, what it ought to explain.

We start from a fact of political economy, a present fact.

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men increases in direct proportion with the increase in value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses nothing more than this: the object that labour produces, its product, confronts it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour that has fixed itself in an object, has become a thing; it is the objectification of labour. The realisation of labour is its objectification. In the condition described by political economy, this realisation of labour appears as the de-realisation of the worker, objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it, appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

The realisation of labour appears as de-realisation to such a degree that the worker is de-realised to the point of starving to death. Objectification appears as loss of the object to such a degree that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for life but also for work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object of which he can take possession only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. The appropriation of the object appears as estrangement to such a degree that the more objects the worker produces, the fewer he can possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, of capital.

All these consequences are contained in the determination that the worker relates to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this presupposition it is clear that the more the worker exhausts himself in work, the more powerful becomes the alien, objective world that he creates over against himself, the poorer he himself, his inner world, becomes, and the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he keeps in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him but to the object. The greater this activity, therefore, the more the worker is without object. What the product of his labour is, he is not. The greater this product, therefore, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, alien to him, and becomes a power on its own confronting him; that the life which he has lent to the object confronts him as hostile and alien.

[XXIII] Let us now look more closely at objectification, at the production of the worker, and in it at the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material in which his labour realises itself, in which it is active, out of which and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labour with [the] means of life, in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which it is exercised, so it also provides [the] means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

The more, then, the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, by his labour, the more he deprives himself of means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour, a means of life of his labour; second, in that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

In both these respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object: first, in that he receives an object of labour, that is, in that he receives work; and second, in that he receives means of subsistence. First, then, in that he can exist as a worker, and second, in that he can exist as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that he can maintain himself as a physical subject only as a worker, and that he is a worker only as a physical subject.

(The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed, according to the laws of political economy, in this way: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more worthless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed the worker; the more civilised his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful labour becomes, the more powerless the worker becomes; the more spirit labour has, the more spiritless the worker becomes and the more he becomes nature’s slave.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by not considering the immediate relation between the worker (labour) and production. Certainly. Labour produces wonders for the rich, but it produces destitution for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but crippling for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one part of the workers back into a barbarous kind of labour and turns the other part into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces stupidity, cretinism for the worker.

The immediate relation of labour to its products is the relation of the worker to the objects of his production. The relation of the man of property to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relation, and confirms it. We shall consider this other side later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relation of labour, we are asking about the relation of the worker to production.

So far we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker in only one of its aspects, namely his relation to the products of his labour. But estrangement shows itself not only in the result but in the act of production, within productive activity itself. How could the worker confront the product of his activity as something alien if he did not estrange himself from himself in the very act of production? The product is after all only the summary of the activity, of production. If, then, the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. The estrangement of the object of labour only sums up the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.

What, then, does the alienation of labour consist in?

First, in the fact that labour is external to the worker, that is, that it does not belong to his nature; that he therefore does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself, feels not content but unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore feels himself at home only outside work, and outside himself in work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but compelled; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy needs outside it. Its alien character shows itself plainly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs not to himself but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, works upon the individual independently of him, that is, as an alien, divine or diabolical activity, so the worker’s activity is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

The result, therefore, is that man (the worker) feels himself freely active only in his animal functions, eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling, his adornment, etc., and in his human functions feels himself no more than an animal. What is animal becomes human, and what is human becomes animal.

Eating, drinking and procreating, etc., are of course also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction that separates them from the rest of the sphere of human activity and makes them final and sole ends, they are animal.

We have considered the act of estrangement of practical human activity, labour, in two aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object that has power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world confronting him with hostility. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within labour. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him: activity as suffering, strength as weakness, procreation as emasculation, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life (for what is life [other] than activity?) as an activity turned against himself, independent of him, not belonging to him. Self-estrangement, as above it was the estrangement of the thing.

[XXIV] We have still to draw a third determination of estranged labour from the two so far considered.

Man is a species-being, not only in that he makes the species, both his own and that of other things, his object in practice and in theory, but also (and this is only another expression for the same thing) in that he relates to himself as the present, living species, in that he relates to himself as a universal and therefore free being.

The life of the species, in man as in the animal, consists physically, to begin with, in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is than the animal, the more universal is the range of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoretically form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art (his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual means of life, which he must first prepare to be enjoyed and digested), so they also form in practice a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality that makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, both inasmuch as nature is (1) a direct means of life and inasmuch as it is [2] the material, the object and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is, nature in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature means: nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature has no other meaning than that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

Since estranged labour estranges from man (1) nature and (2) himself, his own active function, his life-activity, it estranges from man the species; it makes the life of the species into a means of individual life. First, it estranges the life of the species and individual life; and second, it makes the latter, in its abstraction, the purpose of the former, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man only as a means of satisfying a need, the need to maintain physical existence. But productive life is the life of the species. It is life producing life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, lies in the kind of life-activity it has, and free, conscious activity is the species-character of man. Life itself appears only as a means of life.

The animal is immediately one with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or rather, he is a conscious being, that is, his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only for that reason is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relation, so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in working upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, that is, a being that relates to the species as its own essential being, or to itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But an animal produces only what it immediately needs for itself or its young; it produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally; it produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from it; it produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature; its product belongs immediately to its physical body, while man freely confronts his product. The animal forms things only according to the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce according to the standard of every species and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object; man therefore also forms things according to the laws of beauty.

It is just in his working upon the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only intellectually, in consciousness, but actively, in reality, and therefore contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him.

In the same way, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness that man has of his species is thus transformed through estrangement in such a way that species[-life] becomes for him a means.

Estranged labour therefore turns:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-capacity, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as nature outside him, and his spiritual essence, his human essence.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What holds of man’s relation to his labour, to the product of his labour and to himself, holds of man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and the object of his labour.

In general, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that each man is estranged from the others, as each of them is from human nature.

The estrangement of man, and in general every relation in which man [stands] to himself, is first realised and expressed in the relation in which man stands to other men.

In the relation of estranged labour, therefore, each man views the other according to the standard and the relation in which he finds himself as a worker.

[XXV] We started from a fact of political economy, the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept of this fact: estranged, alienated labour. We have analysed this concept, and so have analysed merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see further how the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself in reality.

If the product of labour is alien to me and confronts me as an alien power, to whom then does it belong?

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a forced activity, to whom then does it belong?

To a being other than me.

Who is this being?

The gods? It is true that in the earliest times the principal production, such as the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico, appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. But the gods alone were never the masters of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugates nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods are made superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man should renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product for the sake of these powers.

The alien being to whom labour and the product of labour belong, in whose service labour is done and for whose enjoyment the product of labour exists, can only be man himself.

If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it is an alien power confronting him, this is possible only because it belongs to a man other than the worker. If his activity is a torment to him, it must be enjoyment and the joy of life for another. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

Consider further the proposition stated above, that man’s relation to himself becomes objective and real for him only through his relation to the other man. If, then, he relates to the product of his labour, to his objectified labour, as to an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, he relates to it in such a way that another man, alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him, is the master of this object. If he relates to his own activity as unfree activity, he relates to it as activity in the service, under the dominion, the compulsion and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to other men, distinct from himself. That is why religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relation of the layman to the priest, or, since here it is a question of the intellectual world, to a mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, self-estrangement can appear only through the practical, real relation to other men. The means by which estrangement takes place is itself a practical one. Through estranged labour, then, man produces not only his relation to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relation in which other men stand to his production and his product, and the relation in which he stands to these other men. Just as he makes his own production into his de-realisation, his punishment, and his own product into a loss, a product not belonging to him, so he produces the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity that is not the stranger’s own.

So far we have considered this relation only from the side of the worker; later we shall consider it from the side of the non-worker as well.

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relation to this labour of a man who is alien to labour and stands outside it. The relation of the worker to labour produces the relation of the capitalist to it, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is therefore the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results, by analysis, from the concept of alienated labour, that is, of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from political economy as a result of the movement of private property. But analysis of this concept shows that although private property appears as the ground, the cause, of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion of the human understanding. Later this relation turns into one of reciprocal action.

Only at the final culmination of the development of private property does this secret of private property come to light again, namely that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and on the other that it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.

This development at once throws light on various conflicts that have so far gone unresolved.

(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production, and yet it gives labour nothing and private property everything. From this contradiction Proudhon concluded in favour of labour and against private property. But we see that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has only formulated the laws of estranged labour.

We therefore also see that wages and private property are identical: for wages, in which the product, the object of labour, pays for labour itself, are only a necessary consequence of the estrangement of labour, since in wages labour appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this later, and for now draw only a few conse[XXVI]quences.

A forcible raising of wages (leaving aside all other difficulties, and leaving aside that, being an anomaly, it could only be maintained by force) would therefore be nothing but better pay for slaves, and would not win for either the worker or labour their human meaning and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only turns the relation of the present-day worker to his labour into the relation of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the immediate cause of private property. The one side must therefore fall with the other.

(2) From the relation of estranged labour to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not as though it were only a matter of their emancipation, but because in their emancipation universal human emancipation is contained; and it is contained in it because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are only modifications and consequences of this relation.

Just as we have found the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by analysis, so with the help of these two factors all the categories of political economy can be developed; and in each category, for example trade, competition, capital, money, we shall find only a particular and developed expression of these first foundations.

Before considering this formation, however, let us try to solve two further problems.

(1) To determine the general nature of private property, as it has resulted from estranged labour, in its relation to truly human and social property.

(2) We have taken the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement grounded in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way towards solving the problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of human development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks one is dealing with something outside man. When one speaks of labour, one is dealing immediately with man himself. This new way of putting the question already contains its solution.

On (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property.

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two component parts, which condition each other or which are only different expressions of one and the same relation: appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation, and alienation as appropriation, estrangement as true naturalisation.

We have considered the one side, alienated labour in relation to the worker himself, that is, the relation of alienated labour to itself. As the product, the necessary result of this relation, we have found the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour. Private property, as the material, summarised expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations: the relation of the worker to labour, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labour.

Now, having seen that for the worker, who appropriates nature by his labour, appropriation appears as estrangement, his own activity as activity for another and as the activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, the production of the object as the loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien man, let us now consider the relation of this man, alien to labour and to the worker, to the worker, to labour and to its object.

It is to be noted first that everything that appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement.

Second, that the real, practical attitude of the worker in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker who confronts him as a theoretical attitude.

[XXVII] Third. The non-worker does everything against the worker that the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.

Let us look more closely at these three relations. [XXVII]

[Here the text of the first manuscript, which Marx left unfinished, breaks off.]